This blog is to encorporate discussions on Lost Continents, Catastrophism, The origin of Modern Humans and the Out of Africa theory, Genetics and Human Diversity, The Origin and Spread of Civilization and Cultural Diffusion across the face of the Globe.

Deluge of Atlantis

Deluge of Atlantis

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Pyramid Structures Near Western Cuba.

Pyramids under the waters of Cuba were discovered by two scientists Paul Weinzweig and Pauline Zalitzki. They found the ruins of ancient buildings for about a mile below the sea and considered them to be Atlantis.
Paulina found elsewhere in Cuba ancient descriptions and symbols that was identical to those on the waterfront structures below.
the two scientists used submarines to found tremendous pyramid structures (that remainds giza in Egypt), built of stones weighing hundreds of tons.
They found sphinxes, stones that arranged like Stonehenge, and a written language engraved on the stones.
Why it was not discovered before?
The U.S. government discovered the alleged place during the Cuban missile crisis in the sixties, Nuclear submarines cruising in the Gulf (in deep sea) met pyramid structures. They immediately shut down the site and took control of him and the objects,in order that it will not come to Russians hands.
A whistleblower from the army,that used to serve in Montego Bay told they are still working on the site and recover objects and instruments (including those who still work) since the 60s.
This area in Cuba could not be over waterfront less than 10,000 years ago…links:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klRbcEnLPbUhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hk6SWtumdK0&feature=related

A very well preserved site. My guess is that if the area of the Azores Platform were better explored, we would see more of these. There is an unconfirmed report of a city structure like this 250 miles south of the Azores according to Berlitz.Best Wishes, Dale D.

Friday, September 21, 2012

Genetics traces of unknown humanoid in Africa

September 3rd, 2012
Genetic research among 15 hunter-gatherers from Africa has yielded three surprise findings. For example, indications have been found for the existence of an unknown humanoid. This species must have lived between 20,000 and 80,000 years ago alongside the ancestors of modern humans in Africa. Genes were also found that are partly responsible for the small stature of Pygmies and genetic indications were seen for the adaptation of hunter-gatherers to local conditions.
The researchers mapped the genome of three isolated living groups in Africa, which still live as hunter-gatherers. They mapped a total of 13.4 million genetic variants of which 5 million have never previously been found in other populations.
Earlier research had revealed that people in Europe and Asia possess DNA from other humanoids; now this appears to be the case for African populations as well. The researchers have attributed part of the unknown DNA to a new, previously unknown species. This must have lived alongside the ancestors of modern humans who evolved about 200,000 years ago in Africa. According to the genetic traces there must have been sexual contact between the two species as well. Researchers have calculated that this must have happened between 20,000 and 80,000 years ago. It probably concerns a 'cousin' of the Neanderthal. The DNA of the Neanderthal, however, is slightly different. Genetic traces have now been found for the existence of this new species but the associated fossil evidence has yet to be found.
In Pygmies, the researchers found a variant of the gene responsible for the development of the pituitary gland, a small part of the brain related to hormones and growth. This could be the cause of their short stature and the early age at which they have children.
Finally the researchers saw genetic indications for the adaptation of the hunter-gatherers to local conditions. Although the three groups live in the same manner, they were found to be genetically very different from each other. The researchers found the differences in genetic adaptations in the areas of the immune system, smell and taste. These variations ensure that the groups are adapted to the local conditions, such as prevalent diseases and the food supply, which can differ per area.
African hunter-gatherersThe 15 hunter-gatherers investigated were five Pygmies from Cameroon, and five Hadza and five Sandawe from Tanzania who speak a click language. It has been known for a long time that these groups are genetically close to the first people that all modern humans originated from. A growing volume of human DNA is being read out (sequenced) because, for example, the price of sequencing continues to fall. Africans are still underrepresented when it comes to sequencing the human genome even though humans originated from Africa and many African populations are genetically very different from each other.

Research coupleDutch researchers published about this work together with their American colleagues in the cover story of the renowned journal Cell. Dr Clara Elbers and Dr Bart Ferwerda both received a NWO Rubicon grant to acquire foreign work experience. They are working at the University of Pennsylvania (US) on research led by professor Sarah Tishkoff.
Provided by Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO)

-Looking at human fossils in Africa it is very easy to surmise there was a sepatrate breanch of humans that humans were breeding with but which has entirely disappeared by modern times. One of these types would be called an African-Australoid or Archaic type which eisted up until 10000 years ago or so and then disappeared: in appearance it was something between Rhodesian ((Kabwe) man and more ordinary human beings. That may or may not be the type that these experts have identified by the DNA, but some experts had already identified the type by skull shape alone.

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

This is a review from a couple of different Wikipedia articles to make it cleaer what is ggoing on in those migrations.
The earliest ones we know about were going on in Africa before 100000 BC, at which time basically people diffentiated into the types which stayed in Africa, the members of the first Out of Africa movement from before the Toba explosion a nd the set which would later replace them after the erruption. Both the first wave and the replacement wave headed for India at the arc marked as orange, but most geneticists focus on the main Out of Africa movement after the erruption. The Toba eruption was in the realm of 70-75000 BC. Europe and Northern Asia were colonised in 40-50 thousand BC with similar peoples all across European and Asia at the time.By the end of the period 20-30 thousand years ago (Slighty difference from the chart, the yellow circles), A, B, X and "Other N" have a stronghold in the SE USA and about this same time, B started colonising Japan, and shortly thereafter, there was a transPacific or CircumPacific migration which established C and D in the early Americas. The map shows
A,B,C, D and X in the SE USA core area as all in association but they could have come in two waves from two different points of orign: as the haploid DNA Genetic tables below indicate, the A, B and X lines are out of N and of the groups that typically are associated with the other European groups: C, D, and G lines are out of M groups expanding out of the Orient aand South Asia. Somehow separately other N-derived groups ended up in New Guinea and Australia, probably derived from other movements from Northern Asia headed southward, and this might have some connection the the Upper Cave Peking Man (Choukoudian)
What is also interesting is that there is a movement into both the Eastern US and into Southeastern Brazil in South America in the period of 12-15000 years ago (10000 to 13000 BC) as shown in the light green circles, which is to say once again from the Atlantic headed inland, as well as a secondary use of the Bering strait at the same time (Evidently being C and D at this time, as well as a movement of some A (possibly also some B) FROM North America back to Siberia, with some of the later, modified-A coming back into North America in the postglacial period of 9000 to 7000 years ago.(7000 to 5000 BC, the last date being near to the Black Sea Flood, which is also the latest date for a Bering land bridge as measured by C14). The moves into and out of Asia again are marked archaeologically when some Siberian finds of Plano (Advanced-Clovis-tradition) are found without any more primitive local predecessors. I am assuming that the "Orange" circles in the Eastern US represent Solutreans having crossed over from Europe, and their foreunners in other stone tool traditins, if any went by the same TransAtlantic route. The Eastern Seaboard dates shown here are in good agrement with the proposed dates for invasions out of Atlantis suggested by Lewis Spence and also with the stepwise increase in Sealevel (or Superfloods) as proposed by Graham Hancock, etc.

World map of human migrations, with the North Pole at center. Africa, harboring the start of the migration, is at the top left and South America at the far right. Migration patterns are based on studies of mitochondrial (matrilinear) DNA.
Numbers represent thousand years before present.
The blue line represents area covered in ice or tundra during the last great ice age.
The letters are the mitochondrial DNAhaplogroups (pure motherly lineages); Haplogroups can be used to define genetic populations and are often geographically orientated.

For example, the following are common divisions for mtDNA haplogroups:

African: L, L1, L2, L3, L3

Near Eastern: J, N (Note, N is composed of A,B,F,H,I,J,K,P,R,S,T,U,V,W and X)

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

This very old photo of a mummy from Nevada was recently published by the Facebook page Science of the Remote past and Identified as "The" Spirit Cavwe mummy. It turns out not to be the same as that particular find, BUT it COULD have come from a higher level in the same cave.

Posted at Facebook Page -
Science of Remote Past
Liked · September 4
*The Spirit Cave Mummy*
In 1940, husband-and-wife archaeological team, Sydney and Georgia Wheeler found a mummy in ‘Spirit Cave’ thirteen miles east of Fallon, Nevada. Upon entering Spirit Cave they discovered the remains of two people wrapped in tule matting. One set of remains, buried deeper than the other, had been partially mummified (the head and right shoulder). The Wheelers, with the assistance of local residents, recovered a total of sixty-seven artifacts from the cave. These artifacts were examined at the Nevada State Museum where they were estimated to be between 1,500 and 2,000 years old. 54 years later in 1994, University of California, Riverside anthropologist R. Erv Taylor examined seventeen of the Spirit Cave artifacts using mass spectrometry. The results indicated that the mummy was approximately 9,400 years old — older than any previously known North American mummy. Further study determined that the mummy exhibits Caucasoid characteristics resembling the Ainu (an Ethnic Japanese people)!

The Spirit Cave mummy is the oldest human mummy found in North America[1][2]. It was discovered in 1940 in Spirit Cave, thirteen miles east[3] of Fallon, Nevada by the husband-and-wife archaeological team of Sydney and Georgia Wheeler.
The Wheelers, working for the Nevada State Parks Commission, were surveying possible archaeological sites to prevent their loss due to guano mining. Upon entering Spirit Cave they discovered the remains of two people wrapped in tule matting. One set of remains, buried deeper than the other, had been partially mummified (the head and right shoulder). The Wheelers, with the assistance of local residents, recovered a total of sixty-seven artifacts from the cave.
These artifacts were examined at the Nevada State Museum where they were estimated to be between 1,500 and 2,000 years old. They were deposited at the Nevada State Museum’s storage facility in Carson City where they remained for the next fifty-four years.
In 1996 University of California, Riverside anthropologist R. Ervi Taylor examined seventeen of the Spirit Cave artifacts using mass spectrometry. The results indicated that the mummy was approximately 9,400 years old (uncalibrated Radio-Carbon Years Before-Present (RCYBP); ~11.5 Kya calibrated) — older than any previously known North American mummy.
In March 1997, the Paiute-Shoshone Tribe of the Fallon Reservation and Colony made a Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) claim of cultural affiliation with the artifacts[4].
Further study determined that the mummy exhibits Caucasoid characteristics resembling the Ainu[5], although a definitive affiliation has not been established. There is also a possible link to Polynesians and Australians that is stronger than to any Native American culture[5].
The findings were published[6] by the Nevada State Museum on October 24, 1999[citation needed], and drew immediate[7] national attention[8][9].
In September, 2006, the United States District Court for the District of Nevada ruled on a lawsuit by the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe and said that the Bureau of Land Management made an error in dismissing evidence without a full explanation. The court order remanded the matter back to the BLM for reconsideration of the evidence [10].

The Amazing American Mummy

The oldest mummies in the world were not discovered in Egypt. Far older than the Pharaohs, Nevada’s Spirit Caveman is sparking discoveries even more exciting than the tomb of Tutankhamen

POSTED BY: Renee Valois
July 20, 2009

When most people hear the word mummy they think of ancient Egypt—or of the many horror films featuring resurrected corpses. But the oldest mummies in the world were not created in the nation of the pyramids. They come from the Americas.

The most ancient mummy in North America was found near Fallon, Nev., in 1940 by a married pair of archaeologists the state hired to excavate Spirit Cave. The Spirit Caveman, as he has been dubbed, was buried about 9,415 years ago—thousands of years before the first Egyptian Pharaohs attempted to cheat death.

Like the earliest Egyptian mummies, Spirit Caveman was created by accident. The heat and aridity of the burial cave rapidly dried the corpse, creating a mummy naturally. Any dead body that contains soft tissues preserved by nature or by embalming can be called a mummy. Some, like Spirit Caveman, are only partially mummified; while his hair and the skin on his head and shoulder are intact, portions of his body have decayed to the bone.

Shockingly old
Some experts estimate that hundreds of natural mummies have been found in North America, mostly in the Southwest and in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska—but because American mummies were treated as curiosities and even collected by Victorian hobbyists, accurate records don’t exist. Until recently, most archaeologists thought the mummies were much younger. Spirit Caveman was estimated to be 1,500 to 2,000 years old when he was discovered. But in 1994 R. Erv Taylor of the University of California Riverside Radiocarbon Laboratory took hair and bone samples and came up with a date that shocked not only the Nevada State Museum (which had stored the mummy in a box for over 50 years) but also the whole archaeological community.

Taylor’s samples yielded seven dates, all within a remarkably short span—210 years—providing a very precise age for the mummy: 9,415 (plus or minus 25 years). But the unexpected age was only part of what made Spirit Caveman so remarkable. Like the famous 9,300-year-old Kennewick Man and other Stone Age skeletons (including skulls in Nebraska and Minnesota), the mummy resembles South Asians or even Europeans more than it resembles today’s American Indians.

This has helped to revolutionize anthropologists’ theories of the original colonization of America, which is now thought to have occurred much earlier than once believed. The population of the continent may also have been much more multicultural than anyone expected.

For many years, the accepted history of the peopling of the continent stated that Mongoloid Asians crossed a land bridge into Alaska about 11,500 years ago, and from there spread south and gradually settled throughout America. These were the only supposed ancestors of the tribes today known as American Indians.

The oldest artifacts were believed to be stone spear points found in Clovis, N.M., in the 1930s, dated at 11,000 years old. This was claimed to be the oldest settlement found, and since the first people had arrived just a few hundred years earlier, how could anything much older exist?

With the tenacity of religious zealots, many scientists rejected any evidence that didn’t fit into the “Clovis model.” Many archaeologists didn’t even bother to dig deeper than the 11,000-year-old strata, since they were certain there was nothing more to be found. Those who kept digging—and found artifacts they believed were older than Clovis—were dismissed as fools.

But now everything has changed. Archaeologists are digging deeper and have found prehistoric sites all over the country—from Virginia and Pennsylvania to Nevada—that may be 14,000, 15,000, or even 17,000 years old. Obviously, the New World is not nearly as new as was once thought.

Even more amazingly, the most ancient remains tell a tale of an unexpectedly diverse American population long before the country became known for its “melting pot” of nationalities. For instance, when the Kennewick Man was discovered near the Columbia River in 1996, forensic anthropologists first identified the remains as a 19th-century Caucasian male because the skull looked more Caucasoid than Mongoloid. Every-one was surprised when radiocarbon dating proved the skeleton was more than 9,000 years old.

Spirit Caveman also has features that vary dramatically from the flattened, wide face of traditional Amerindians. His long head, wide nose, forward-projecting face, and strong chin make him (like the Kennewick Man) look more Caucasian (and some scientists say both skulls resemble those of the aboriginal Ainu of Japan "although a definitive affiliation has not been established" .)

Genetic findings by Theodore Schurr, a molecular anthropologist from Emory University in Atlanta, suggest a link between ancient Eurasians and Native Americans. A genetic marker, “Lineage X,” has been found in modern and ancient remains of Native Americans, and in European and Near Eastern groups—but not in any Asian peoples, the supposed ancestors of Native Americans.

Also, an examination of archaeological collections in Europe has uncovered a surprising similarity between artifacts created by early Americans and the Solutrean Paleolithic culture on the north coast of Spain. Stone and bone tools, engraved limestone tablets, and other items appear nearly identical to North American artifacts. All of this suggests that a group of Caucasians may have migrated from Europe to North America more than 9,000 years ago.

Indians claim remains

If so, they didn’t come over the Bering Strait. Glaciers in America’s center created an insurmountable barrier, preventing travel from west to east until their retreat about 11,500 years ago. Yet tools older than that have been found in the eastern part of North America, suggesting that the inhabitants who made them also came from the East.

No one claims that prehistoric people could have successfully navigated the open Atlantic, but scientists say they didn’t have to. Early European seafarers could have made it to America by following the seasonal pack ice that connected England to Nova Scotia, dining on sea mammals and waterfowl along the way. In a similar way, Poly-nesian and Asian groups could have reached America from the west via the sea.

The earliest peoples were either killed off or absorbed into the tribes of later arrivals, which begs the question: Are today’s Native Americans really descended from the first arrivals, or from a later wave of settlers? Or is their ancestry really a mix of earlier and later peoples?

Legal action delays answers. Tribes are exercising their rights under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 to claim any excavated remains they view as Native American. Once identified, the remains are reverently reburied and scientists are not permitted to examine them, effectively curtailing the expansion of anthropological knowledge. Given the lack of respect with which Native American remains have often been treated in the past, it isn’t hard to understand why many tribes feel their ancestors are better off in Native American hands. But are the recent finds truly Native American?

Scientists and Native Americans remain split on the issue—and so is the government. In 2000, the Nevada Bureau of Land Management (BLM) stated that there was no cultural, biological, or physical evidence that showed Spirit Caveman was an ancestor of the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone tribe that claimed him and wanted to rebury him. In the same year, U.S. secretary of the interior Bruce Babbitt decided that five Indian tribe claimants did have legal right to the Kennewick Man. But neither ruling has actually resolved the issue.

In January 2003, the National Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act advisory committee to the National Park Service made its recommendation. The committee, composed primarily of Native Americans, recommended that the National Park Service recognize that Spirit Caveman is affiliated with and should be handed over to the tribe claiming him. This recommendation spurred the tribe to appeal the original Nevada BLM ruling to the U.S. secretary of the interior, who has sent the responsibility for a determination back to the director of the federal BLM.

In the meantime, the University of California, Davis, originally petitioned the Nevada BLM to allow DNA testing on the mummy, which could settle the question once and for all, in a scientific rather than a political manner. But because of the controversy, the Nevada museum declined to allow testing, and the scientists have withdrawn their request—at least for now.

‘It’s disrespectful’
According to Rochanne Downs, cultural resources director of the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone tribe, the tribe is opposed to DNA testing because it would be destructive to the remains. “It’s disrespectful,” she says. “Every burial is sacred. Taking our ancestors out of the ground disrupts their journey.”

As the legal wrangling continues, no research is being allowed on Spirit Caveman, who remains in federal custody in an archival container locked behind three levels of security. Only one person—Scott K. Sisco, Nevada’s interim director of the Department of Cultural Affairs—holds the key to Spirit Caveman, who could himself hold the key to unlocking the mystery of the prehistoric settling of America.

An amateur archaeologist since childhood days, Renee Valois has written numerous articles for national magazines and newspapers as well as television, radio, and the Web. She lives with her mystery-novelist husband and children in the Twin Cities.

More Memorable Mummies

[It seems that the hoto that started this blog was actually one of these other 19th Century mummies and henvce it is really a red herring encountered during the research-DD]

Although Native American mummies are now being treated with respect, other American mummies are another matter. Some are still displayed in bizarre roadside attractions, and their stories are as astonishing as Spirit Caveman’s.

Insane Mummies from a Funny Farmer
In the bathroom of an old train station in Philippi, W.V., two coffins sit on a wooden bench where the toilet used to be. Inside the glass-topped coffins are two mummies. There are no wrappings to conceal the gaunt, discolored flesh, and their names are long forgotten.

But the pair were once residents of the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane. When they died in 1888, no family members claimed the bodies, so they were obtained by a farmer named Graham Hamrick, who was intent on cracking the secrets of the Pharaohs. He had started experimenting with vegetables (after friends dined at his home, he would reveal that the food was years old) and then moved on to preserving animals.

He eagerly used the two corpses to test the embalming recipe he had concocted after reading about the technique in the Bible. The mixture supposedly included water, saltpeter, and absorbable fumes created from the combustion of sublimed sulfur—a less toxic concoction than the arsenic and mercury traditionally used by undertakers.

Museum curator Olivia Sue Lambert says the Smithsonian Institution promised to exhibit one of Hamrick’s amazingly preserved mummies if he would reveal the formula. He was also offered $10,000 for it. But Hamrick refused both offers, and when he died a few years later, he was not mummified as he had requested.

The two mummies, however, persevered. They toured Europe with P.T. Barnum, then they returned to Philippi, where they were exhibited for years at fairs. Eventually they landed in the Barbour County Historical Museum, where you can see them in the former train station’s bathroom for a dollar.

Sylvester, the Murdered Mummy?Tucked in with the shrunken heads, jackalopes, and mercreatures of Ye Olde Curiosity Shop in Seattle is a mummy that looks so good that experts used to think it was fake—until they examined it via CAT scan at the University of Washington Hospital. Scientists were amazed to discover that the mummy’s organs were intact, and that he had shrunk by only about a third. Most mummies shrivel so much that there’s hardly anything left.

But “Sylvester” weighs more than 100 pounds and appears wet and shiny. Investigators discovered that his unnatural sheen was due to arsenic, which was used near the end of the Civil War to preserve dead officers so they could make it intact to burial back home. Shop owner Andy James says that when the mummy was bought from a woman decades ago in California, she said it had been found in 1895 in the desert by wandering cowboys. Supposedly, the hot dry sands had naturally mummified the corpse.

Instead, experts now believe someone embalmed the corpse in the 19th century and then decided to make a buck by exhibiting it. But the identity of the mummy remains a mystery—as do the circumstances of the man’s death.

James says the investigators discovered a piece of bullet in the mummy, which they believe bounced off a rib and punctured his lung. But we may never know whether “Sylvester” was an innocent victim or an outlaw who met his end—but refused to disappear.

No Dummy of a Mummy
During filming of a scene for the television series “The Six Million Dollar Man” in 1976, a worker tried to move a dummy dangling from the ceiling of a fun house because it didn’t look right. But it looked even worse when the arm came off and a human bone could be seen poking out. Everyone—including the fun house owners—had thought the figure was made of papier-mâché, but an autopsy showed that the man had been shot and then embalmed in arsenic. It took a while to unravel the mystery of the mummy’s identity and his long, strange journey to Long Beach, Calif.

Apparently, Elmer McCurdy was born in 1880 and quickly began a life of not-so-successful crime. During one train robbery, he overestimated the amount of explosives needed to open a safe, blasting a hole in the side of the train and transforming thousands of dollars in silver coins into a molten mess. McCurdy and his cohorts couldn’t chip much off the walls and floor before their humiliated getaway.

During his final heist, McCurdy and his crew robbed the wrong train and made off with less than $50. A local newspaper derisively described the haul as “one of the smallest in the history of bank-robbing.” McCurdy refused to surrender to the posse that tracked him to a hayloft and subsequently was killed in the shoot-out.

No one claimed the outlaw’s embalmed body, so the mortician decided to prop it in the corner of the mortuary with a gun in its hand and charged visitors five cents to gawk at “the bandit who wouldn’t give up.”

Eventually two men showed up, claiming McCurdy was their beloved brother. But instead of giving him a long-overdue burial, they made McCurdy a star in their traveling carnival. By the time he was sold many years later, his identity and even his humanity had been lost. When the mummy (by now believed to be a dummy) was sold to a haunted house near Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, it was soon rejected, ironically enough, for being insufficiently “lifelike.”

The mummy’s last stop was the fun house. After McCurdy was finally identified, he was flown to a cemetery in Oklahoma. Two cubic yards of cement were poured over the coffin to ensure that the mummy’s traveling days were over.­—R.V.

Saturday, January 5, 2008

Chapter 9 - Spirit Cave Mummy
& Lovelock Cave Mummy

Lovelock and Spirit cave mummies. Over 9,000
years old, and Caucasoid. Located in same area where ancient Paiute Indian
legends say the Paiutes “exterminated” a light skinned, red haired tribe who
spoke a different language in ancient times. A complete news interview with a
California News station (KCRA-3) from the mid-90’s is included. This interview
mentions the fact that these people were “here thousands and thousands of years
before the Indians” and the archaeologist interviewed says “these are Caucasoid
traits.”

2012 New Book Published

I believe we have reached a point where the skeletons and mummies in this area were Caucasian-like Paleoindians but more likely Solutrean Cro-Magnons (or "Iberians") than like any other groups. The Polynesian suggestion is interesting but if there is any connection it must be late since there is no definitive evidence for Polynsians in the Pacific before the first millenium BC: ALL mentions of "Ainu" in connection to this and other Paleoindian skulls turns out to be so much wishful thinking. BUT we do seem to have the direct connection: the Lubbock cave Giants were out of CroMagnon stock and related to the Spirit Cave people before them.Best Wishes, Dale D.

Genome Brings Ancient Girl to Life

By Ann Gibbons, ScienceNOW
In a stunning technical feat, an international team of scientists has
sequenced the genome of an archaic Siberian girl 31 times over, using a new
method that amplifies single strands of DNA. The sequencing is so complete that
researchers have as sharp a picture of this ancient genome as they would of a
living person’s, revealing, for example that the girl had brown eyes, hair, and
skin. “No one thought we would have an archaic human genome of such quality,”
says Matthias Meyer, a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. “Everyone was shocked by the counts. That
includes me.”
That precision allows the team
to compare the nuclear genome of this girl, who lived in Siberia’s Denisova Cave
more than 50,000 years ago, directly to the genomes of living people, producing
a “near-complete” catalog of the small number of genetic changes that make us
different from the Denisovans, who were close relatives of Neandertals. “This is
the genetic recipe for being a modern human,” says team leader Svante Pääbo, a
paleogeneticist at the institute.
Ironically, this high-resolution genome means that the Denisovans, who are
represented in the fossil record by only one tiny finger bone and two teeth, are
much better known genetically than any other ancient human — including
Neandertals, of which there are hundreds of specimens. The team confirms that
the Denisovans interbred with the ancestors of some living humans and found that
Denisovans had little genetic diversity, suggesting that their small population
waned further as populations of modern humans expanded. “Meyer and the
consortium have set up the field of ancient DNA to be revolutionized — again,”
says Beth Shapiro, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California,
Santa Cruz, who was not part of the team. Evolutionary geneticist Sarah Tishkoff
of the University of Pennsylvania agrees: “It’s really going to move the field
forward.”
Pääbo’s group first gave the field a jolt in May 2010 by reporting a
low-coverage sequence (1.3 copies on average) of the composite nuclear genome
from three Neandertals. They found that 1 percent to 4 percent of the DNA of
Europeans and Asians, but not of Africans, was shared with Neandertals and
concluded that modern humans interbred with Neandertals at low levels.
Just 7 months later, the same group published 1.9 copies on average of a
nuclear genome from a girl’s pinky finger bone from Denisova Cave. They found
she was neither a Neandertal nor a modern human — although bones of both species
had been found in the cave — but a new lineage that they called Denisovan. The
team found “Denisovan DNA” in some island Southeast Asians and concluded that
their ancestors also interbred with the ancestors of Denisovans, probably in
Asia.
But these genomes were too low quality to produce a reliable catalog of
differences. Part of the problem was that ancient DNA is fragmentary, and most
of it breaks down into single strands after it is extracted from bone.
Meyer’s breakthrough came in developing a method to start the sequencing
process with single strands of DNA instead of double strands, as is usually
done. By binding special molecules to the ends of a single strand, the ancient
DNA was held in place while enzymes copied its sequence. The result was a
sixfold to 22-fold increase in the amount of Denisovan DNA sequenced from a
meager 10-milligram sample from the girl’s finger. The team was able to cover
99.9 percent of the mappable nucleotide positions in the genome at least once,
and more than 92 percent of the sites at least 20 times, which is considered a
benchmark for identifying sites reliably. About half of the 31 copies came from
the girl’s mother and half from her father, producing a genome “of equivalent
quality to a recent human genome,” says paleoanthropologist John Hawks of the
University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was not part of the team.
Now, the view of the ancient genome is so clear that Meyer and his colleagues
were able to detect for the first time that Denisovans, like modern humans, had
23 pairs of chromosomes, rather than 24 pairs, as in chimpanzees. By aligning
the Denisovan genome with that of the reference human genome and counting
mutations, the team calculated that the Denisovan and modern human populations
finally split between 170,000 and 700,000 years ago.
The researchers also estimated ancient Denisovan population sizes by using
methods to estimate the age of various gene lineages and the amount of
difference between the chromosomes the girl inherited from her mother and
father. They found that Denisovan genetic diversity, already low, shrank even
more 400,000 years ago, reflecting small populations at that time. By contrast,
our ancestors’ population apparently doubled before their exodus from
Africa.
The team also counted the differences between Denisovans and chimps, and
found that they have fewer differences than do modern people and chimps. The
girl’s lineage had less time to accumulate mutations, and the “missing
evolution” suggests she died about 80,000 years ago, although the date is
tentative, says co-author David Reich, a population geneticist at Harvard
University. If this date — the first proof that a fossil can be directly dated
from its genome — holds up, it is considerably older than the very rough dates
of 30,000 to more than 50,000 years for the layer of sediment where the fossils
of Denisovans, Neandertals, and modern humans all were found.
The team says the new genome confirms their previous findings, showing that
about 3 percent of the genomes of living people in Papua New Guinea come from
Denisovans, while the Han and Dai on mainland China have only a trace of
Denisovan DNA. Furthermore, the team determined that Papuans have more Denisovan
DNA on their autosomes, inherited equally often from both parents, than on their
X chromosomes, inherited twice as often from the mother. This curious pattern
suggests several possible scenarios, including that male Denisovans interbred
with female modern humans, or that these unions were genetically incompatible,
with natural selection weeding out some of the X chromosomes, Reich says.
The new genome also suggests one odd result. By using the detailed Denisovan
genome to sharpen the view of their close cousins the Neandertals, the team
concludes that living East Asians have more Neandertal DNA than Europeans have.
But most Neandertal fossils are from Europe; Paleoanthropologist Richard Klein
of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, calls the result
“peculiar.”
Most exciting to Pääbo is the “nearly complete catalog” of differences in
genes between the groups. This includes 111,812 single nucleotides that changed
in modern humans in the past 100,000 years or so. Of those, eight were in genes
associated with the wiring of the nervous system, including those involved in
the growth of axons and dendrites and a gene implicated in autism. Pääbo is
intrigued in particular by a change in a gene that is regulated by the so-called
FOXP2 gene, implicated in speech disorders. It is “tempting to speculate that
crucial aspects of synaptic transmission may have changed in modern humans,” the
team wrote. Thirty-four genes are associated with disease in humans. The list
suggests some obvious candidates for gene-expression studies. “The cool thing is
that it isn’t an astronomically large list,” Pääbo says. “Our group and others
will probably be able to analyze most of them in the next decade or two.”
Back in Leipzig, the mood is upbeat, as researchers pull fossil samples off
the shelf to test anew with “Matthias’s method.” First on Pääbo’s list:
Neandertal bone samples, to try to produce a Neandertal genome to rival that of
the little Denisovan girl. This story provided by ScienceNOW, the daily online
news service of the journal Science.

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